One big drawback to being as friggin’ drop dead ridiculously gorgeous and sexy as Sofia Vergara–It’s pretty impossible for people to see (or bother looking for) your spiritual assets when your physical ones are so distracting.

If you’ve watched the Emmy-award winning ABC show “Modern Family,” you already know. Sofia’s character Gloria is a scene-stealer whose thick Columbian accent seems almost too thick to be true–along with some other thick things that Sofia was actually born with. (She wanted a breast reduction, but her mom talked her out of it, saying, “God is going to punish you if you cut them.”)

Before she was discovered on a beach in Columbia and fast-tracked to modeling gigs and a Pepsi ad, Sofia was a catholic school girl (no, really) who more than anything wanted to be a dentist. Please. Can you imagine how popular her dental practice would have been? She abandoned her dentistry dreams to take her first television hosting job–but only after consulting with the nuns in her hometown school who told her to go for it.

Beauty has not shielded Vergara from life’s tragedies. In 1998 her brother Rafael was murdered by kidnappers in Bogota, Columbia and two years after his death Sofia was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, which she was able to beat with radiation and surgery. About her cancer battle she said,

“When you go through something like this, it’s hard, but you learn a lot from it. Your priorities change. You don’t sweat the small stuff. “

The experience led her to create Peace and Hope for the Children of Colombia, a charitable organization that has served thousands of needy children in her home country.

“Through the charity I sponsor, we’re building a cancer center in my hometown of Barranquilla. I visited the cancer ward of a hospital in Colombia, and parents were just sitting on the floor while their kids were being treated.”

Sofia also launched a clothing line called Vergara by Sofia, a socially-conscious brand generating over 1,500 jobs in her native country.

This fall Vergara joined Gloria Estefan, Placido Domingo, Enrique Iglesias and other Latin stars to record the song and video “La Gota de la Vida” to raise money for bone marrow donation awareness.